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• W2068424096 abstract "Adventures in the Book Trade:The Publication History of Stevens' Harmonium and Ideas of Order Chris Beyers Nowadays, most readers of Wallace Stevens become acquainted with the poet first through an anthology, then through The Collected Poems (1954) or the Library of America edition of the Collected Poetry and Prose (1997). Undoubtedly, some still use Holly Stevens' selection, The Palm at the End of the Mind (1971), or they own one of the other selected volumes. However, to read Stevens in these collections is to read him in a context he resisted during his lifetime. Stevens put off the publication of The Collected Poems for almost a decade, fearing his earlier books would be buried by a collection (WAS 3171) and that a collected volume might announce the conclusion of his career as a poet. As he wrote to Barbara Church in 1954, a collected edition puts an end to things. But I am reaching an age where I don't have much choice (L 832). Despite the success of The Collected Poems (it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and has been continuously in print), Stevens' prophecies by and large came true. The poet died within a year after the book's publication, and previous books are now out of print. This essay wishes to investigate how we may consider especially Harmonium and Ideas of Order as individual books instead of subsections of The Collected Poems. I will argue that to do so still has the potential to change the reader's experience of the poems. To demonstrate this, I will tell the partially neglected, partially unknown story of how Stevens' first two books came to be. We can pinpoint Stevens' decision to try to put together his first book, Harmonium (1923), fairly exactly. In a letter postmarked July 17, 1922, he writes to Carl Van Vechten that he will visit before long, then adds, I feel frightfully uncertain about a book. But we can talk that over, at any rate, among other things; and on August 24, he tells the editor of Poetry, Harriet Monroe, he has agreed in substance to publish a book with Alfred A. Knopf, which he did [a] few weeks ago (L 228). A little over a month later, he laments to Monroe that it is depressing to gather the things for my book (L 231). For Stevens, the apprehension was especially [End Page 79] acute due to his notion of what it meant to write a book rather than just assembling poems already written. The clearest statement of the poet's early formation of this idea appears in a letter dated April 9, 1918, quoted in the prologue to William Carlos Williams' Kora in Hell. In it, Stevens objects to the casual character of Williams' third book of poems, Al Que Quiere! Finding no discernible organizing principle, and professing a distaste for miscellany, he balks at Williams' improvisational approach. A poet should stick to a central point of view, he claims, since to fidget with points of view leads always to new beginnings and incessant new beginnings lead to sterility. In a sentence that has often been quoted by critics, he adds, But a book of poems is a damned serious affair (qtd. in Williams 15). His objection to Williams' collection may at first seem odd, since, as Lisa M. Steinman remarks, we tend to think of Stevens as fidgeting with points of view (174). But such a response confuses the individual points of view of different characters with the overall perspective of a book. Stevens saw nothing wrong with portraying perspectives other than his own. What he worried about was whether the implied author (as Wayne Booth would later call him) seemed to be fidgeting. The letter to Williams reflects Stevens' worries and scruples about collecting his poems, as Robert Rehder puts it (23). Rehder goes on to trace Stevens' concern for coherence, which, he says, led him to concentrate on his 'true subject,' the relations between reality and the imagination (24). Such a reading is certainly legitimate, but it neglects Stevens' more pressing anxiety in the 1910s and 1920s—his misgivings about multiplying transient perspectives. This concern..." @default.
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• W2068424096 title "Adventures in the Book Trade: The Publication History of Stevens' <i>Harmonium</i> and <i>Ideas of Order</i>" @default.
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